A Book of Scoundrels

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A BOOK OF SCOUNDRELS

By Charles Whibley




To the Greeks FOOLISHNESS



I desire to thank the Proprietors of the 'National Observer,' the
'New Review,' the 'Pall Mall Gazette,' and 'Macmillan's Magazine,' for
courteous permission to reprint certain chapters of this book.



CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

CAPTAIN HIND

MOLL CUTPURSE AND JONATHAN WILD
I. MOLL CUTPURSE
II. JONATHAN WILD
III. A PARALLEL

RALPH BRISCOE

GILDEROY AND SIXTEEN-STRING JACK
I. GILDEROY
II. SIXTEEN-STRING JACK
III. A PARALLEL

THOMAS PURENEY

SHEPPARD AND CARTOUCHE
I. JACK SHEPPARD
II. LOUIS-DOMINIQUE CARTOUCHE
III. A PARALLEL

VAUX

GEORGE BARRINGTON

THE SWITCHER AND GENTLEMAN HARRY
I. THE SWITCHER
II. GENTLEMAN HARRY
III. A PARALLEL

DEACON BRODIE AND CHARLES PEACE
I. DEACON BRODIE
II. CHARLES PEACE
III. A PARALLEL

THE MAN IN THE GREY SUIT

MONSIEUR L'ABBE




INTRODUCTION

There are other manifestations of greatness than to relieve suffering or
to wreck an empire. Julius Caesar and John Howard are not the only heroes
who have smiled upon the world. In the supreme adaptation of means to an
end there is a constant nobility, for neither ambition nor virtue is
the essential of a perfect action. How shall you contemplate with
indifference the career of an artist whom genius or good guidance
has compelled to exercise his peculiar skill, to indulge his finer
aptitudes? A masterly theft rises in its claim to respect high above the
reprobation of the moralist. The scoundrel, when once justice is quit
of him, has a right to be appraised by his actions, not by their
effect; and he dies secure in the knowledge that he is commonly more
distinguished, if he be less loved, than his virtuous contemporaries.

While murder is wellnigh as old as life, property and the pocket
invented theft, late-born among the arts. It was not until avarice
had devised many a cunning trick for the protection of wealth, until
civilisation had multiplied the forms of portable property, that
thieving became a liberal and an elegant profession. True, in pastoral
society, the lawless man was eager to lift cattle, to break down the
barrier between robbery and warfare. But the contrast is as sharp
between the savagery of the ancient reiver and the polished performance
of Captain Hind as between the daub of the pavement and the perfection
of Velasquez.

So long as the Gothic spirit governed Europe, expressing itself in
useless ornament and wanton brutality, the more delicate crafts had
no hope of exercise. Even the adventurer upon the road threatened his
victim with a bludgeon, nor was it until the breath of the Renaissance
had vivified the world that a gentleman and an artist could face the
traveller with a courteous demand for his purse. But the age which
witnessed the enterprise of Drake and the triumph of Shakespeare knew
also the prowess of the highwayman and the dexterity of the cutpurse.
Though the art displayed all the freshness and curiosity of the
primitives, still it was art. With Gamaliel Ratsey, who demanded a
scene from Hamlet of a rifled player, and who could not rob a Cambridge
scholar without bidding him deliver an oration in a wood, theft
was already better than a vulgar extortion. Moll Cutpurse, whose
intelligence and audacity were never bettered, was among the bravest of
the Elizabethans. Her temperament was as large and as reckless as
Ben Jonson's own. Neither her tongue nor her courage knew the curb of
modesty, and she was the first to reduce her craft to a set of wise and
imperious rules. She it was who discovered the secret of discipline,
and who insisted that every member of her gang should undertake no other
enterprise than that for which nature had framed him. Thus she made easy
the path for that other hero, of whom you are told that his band was
made up 'of several sorts of wicked artists, of whom he made several
uses, according as he perceived which way every man's particular talent
lay.' This statesman--Thomas Dun was his name--drew up for the use of
his comrades a stringent and stately code, and he was wont to deliver
an address to all novices concerning the art and mystery of robbing
upon the highway. Under auspices so brilliant, thievery could not but
flourish, and when the Stuarts sat upon the throne it was already lifted
above the level of questioning experiment.

Every art is shaped by its material, and with the variations of its
material it must perforce vary. If the skill of the cutpurse compelled
the invention of the pocket, it is certain that the rare difficulties
of the pocket created the miraculous skill of those crafty fingers which
were destined to empty it. And as increased obstacles are perfection's
best incentive, a finer cunning grew out of the fresh precaution.
History does not tell us who it was that discovered this new continent
of roguery. Those there are who give the credit to the valiant Moll
Cutpurse; but though the Roaring Girl had wit to conceive a thousand
strange enterprises, she had not the hand to carry them out, and the
first pickpocket must needs have been a man of action. Moreover, her
nickname suggests the more ancient practice, and it is wiser to yield
the credit to Simon Fletcher, whose praises are chanted by the early
historians.

Now, Simon, says his biographer, was 'looked upon to be the greatest
artist of his age by all his contemporaries.' The son of a baker
in Rosemary Lane, he early deserted his father's oven for a life of
adventure; and he claims to have been the first collector who, stealing
the money, yet left the case. The new method was incomparably more
subtle than the old: it afforded an opportunity of a hitherto unimagined
delicacy; the wielders of the scissors were aghast at a skill which put
their own clumsiness to shame, and which to a previous generation would
have seemed the wildest fantasy. Yet so strong is habit, that even
when the picking of pockets was a recognised industry, the superfluous
scissors still survived, and many a rogue has hanged upon the Tree
because he attempted with a vulgar implement such feats as his unaided
forks had far more easily accomplished.

But, despite the innovation of Simon Fletcher, the highway was the glory
of Elizabeth, the still greater glory of the Stuarts. 'The Lacedaemonians
were the only people,' said Horace Walpole, 'except the English who seem
to have put robbery on a right foot.' And the English of the seventeenth
century need fear the rivalry of no Lacedaemonian. They were, indeed,
the most valiant and graceful robbers that the world has ever known.
The Civil War encouraged their profession, and, since many of them had
fought for their king, a proper hatred of Cromwell sharpened their wits.
They were scholars as well as gentlemen; they tempered their sport with
a merry wit; their avarice alone surpassed their courtesy; and they
robbed with so perfect a regard for the proprieties that it was only the
pedant and the parliamentarian who resented their interference.

Nor did their princely manner fail of its effect upon their victims. The
middle of the seventeenth century was the golden age, not only of the
robber, but of the robbed. The game was played upon either side with a
scrupulous respect for a potent, if unwritten, law. Neither might nor
right was permitted to control the issue. A gaily attired, superbly
mounted highwayman would hold up a coach packed with armed men, and take
a purse from each, though a vigorous remonstrance might have carried him
to Tyburn. But the traveller knew his place: he did what was expected of
him in the best of tempers. Who was he that he should yield in courtesy
to the man in the vizard? As it was monstrous for the one to discharge
his pistol, so the other could not resist without committing an outrage
upon tradition. One wonders what had been the result if some mannerless
reformer had declined his assailant's invitation and drawn his sword.
Maybe the sensitive art might have died under this sharp rebuff. But
none save regicides were known to resist, and their resistance was never
more forcible than a volley of texts. Thus the High-toby-crack swaggered
it with insolent gaiety, knowing no worse misery than the fear of the
Tree, so long as he followed the rules of his craft. But let a touch of
brutality disgrace his method, and he appealed in vain for sympathy or
indulgence. The ruffian, for instance, of whom it is grimly recorded
that he added a tie-wig to his booty, neither deserved nor received the
smallest consideration. Delivered to justice, he speedily met the death
his vulgarity merited, and the road was taught the salutary lesson that
wigs were as sacred as trinkets hallowed by association.

With the eighteenth century the highway fell upon decline. No doubt in
its silver age, the century's beginning, many a brilliant deed was done.
Something of the old policy survived, and men of spirit still went upon
the pad. But the breadth of the ancient style was speedily forgotten;
and by the time the First George climbed to the throne, robbery
was already a sordid trade. Neither side was conscious of its noble
obligation. The vulgar audacity of a bullying thief was suitably
answered by the ungracious, involuntary submission of the terrified
traveller. From end to end of England you might hear the cry of 'Stand
and deliver.' Yet how changed the accent! The beauty of gesture, the
deference of carriage, the ready response to a legitimate demand--all
the qualities of a dignified art were lost for ever. As its professors
increased in number, the note of aristocracy, once dominant, was
silenced. The meanest rogue, who could hire a horse, might cut a
contemptible figure on Bagshot Heath, and feel no shame at robbing
a poor man. Once--in that Augustan age, whose brightest ornament
was Captain Hind--it was something of a distinction to be decently
plundered. A century later there was none so humble but he might be
asked to empty his pocket. In brief, the blight of democracy was upon
what should have remained a refined, secluded art; and nowise is the
decay better illustrated than in the appreciation of bunglers, whose
exploits were scarce worth a record.

James Maclaine, for instance, was the hero of his age. In a history
of cowards he would deserve the first place, and the 'Gentleman
Highwayman,' as he was pompously styled, enjoyed a triumph denied to
many a victorious general. Lord Mountford led half White's to do him
honour on the day of his arrest. On the first Sunday, which he spent in
Newgate, three thousand jostled for entrance to his cell, and the
poor devil fainted three times at the heat caused by the throng of his
admirers. So long as his fate hung in the balance, Walpole could not
take up his pen without a compliment to the man, who claimed to have
robbed him near Hyde Park. Yet a more pitiful rascal never showed the
white feather. Not once was he known to take a purse with his own hand,
the summit of his achievement being to hold the horses' heads while his
accomplice spoke with the passengers. A poltroon before his arrest, in
Court he whimpered and whinnied for mercy; he was carried to the cart
pallid and trembling, and not even his preposterous finery availed to
hearten him at the gallows. Taxed with his timidity, he attempted to
excuse himself on the inadmissible plea of moral rectitude. 'I have as
much personal courage in an honourable cause,' he exclaimed in a passage
of false dignity, 'as any man in Britain; but as I knew I was committing
acts of injustice, so I went to them half loth and half consenting; and
in that sense I own I am a coward indeed.'

The disingenuousness of this proclamation is as remarkable as its
hypocrisy. Well might he brag of his courage in an honourable cause,
when he knew that he could never be put to the test. But what palliation
shall you find for a rogue with so little pride in his art, that he
exercised it 'half loth, half consenting'? It is not in this recreant
spirit that masterpieces are achieved, and Maclaine had better have
stayed in the far Highland parish, which bred him, than have attempted
to cut a figure in the larger world of London. His famous encounter with
Walpole should have covered him with disgrace, for it was ignoble at
every point; and the art was so little understood, that it merely added
a leaf to his crown of glory. Now, though Walpole was far too well-bred
to oppose the demand of an armed stranger, Maclaine, in defiance of
his craft, discharged his pistol at an innocent head. True, he wrote
a letter of apology, and insisted that, had the one pistol-shot proved
fatal, he had another in reserve for himself. But not even Walpole would
have believed him, had not an amiable faith given him an opportunity for
the answering quip: 'Can I do less than say I will be hanged if he is?'

As Maclaine was a coward and no thief, so also he was a snob and no
gentleman. His boasted elegance was not more respectable than his art.
Fine clothes are the embellishment of a true adventurer; they hang ill
on the sloping shoulders of a poltroon.

And Maclaine, with all the ostensible weaknesses of his kind, would
claim regard for the strength that he knew not. He occupied a costly
apartment in St. James's Street; his morning dress was a crimson damask
banjam, a silk shag waistcoat, trimmed with lace, black velvet breeches,
white silk stockings, and yellow morocco slippers; but since his
magnificence added no jot to his courage, it was rather mean than
admirable. Indeed, his whole career was marred by the provincialism of
his native manse.

And he was the adored of an intelligent age; he basked a few brief weeks
in the noonday sun of fashion.

If distinction was not the heritage of the Eighteenth Century, its glory
is that now and again a giant raised his head above the stature of a
prevailing rectitude. The art of verse was lost in rhetoric; the noble
prose, invented by the Elizabethans, and refined under the Stuarts, was
whittled away to common sense by the admirers of Addison and Steele.
Swift and Johnson, Gibbon and Fielding, were apparitions of strength
in an amiable, ineffective age. They emerged sudden from the impeccable
greyness, to which they afforded an heroic contrast. So, while the
highway drifted--drifted to a vulgar incompetence, the craft was
illumined by many a flash of unexpected genius. The brilliant
achievements of Jonathan Wild and of Jack Sheppard might have relieved
the gloom of the darkest era, and their separate masterpieces make some
atonement for the environing cowardice and stupidity. Above all, the
Eighteenth Century was Newgate's golden age; now for the first time and
the last were the rules and customs of the Jug perfectly understood.
If Jonathan the Great was unrivalled in the art of clapping his enemies
into prison, if Jack the Slip-string was supreme in the rarer art of
getting himself out, even the meanest criminal of his time knew what
was expected of him, so long as he wandered within the walled yard, or
listened to the ministrations of the snuff-besmirched Ordinary. He might
show a lamentable lack of cleverness in carrying off his booty; he might
prove a too easy victim to the wiles of the thief-catcher; but he never
fell short of courage, when asked to sustain the consequences of his
crime.

Newgate, compared by one eminent author to a university, by another to
a ship, was a republic, whose liberty extended only so far as its iron
door. While there was no liberty without, there was licence within; and
if the culprit, who paid for the smallest indiscretion with his neck,
understood the etiquette of the place, he spent his last weeks in an
orgie of rollicking lawlessness. He drank, he ate, he diced; he
received his friends, or chaffed the Ordinary; he attempted, through
the well-paid cunning of the Clerk, to bribe the jury; and when every
artifice had failed he went to Tyburn like a man. If he knew not how to
live, at least he would show a resentful world how to die.

'In no country,' wrote Sir T. Smith, a distinguished lawyer of the time,
'do malefactors go to execution more intrepidly than in England'; and
assuredly, buoyed up by custom and the approval of their fellows, Wild's
victims made a brave show at the gallows. Nor was their bravery the
result of a common callousness. They understood at once the humour and
the delicacy of the situation. Though hitherto they had chaffed the
Ordinary, they now listened to his exhortation with at least a semblance
of respect; and though their last night upon earth might have been
devoted to a joyous company, they did not withhold their ear from the
Bellman's Chant. As twelve o'clock approached--their last midnight upon
earth--they would interrupt the most spirited discourse, they would
check the tour of the mellowest bottle to listen to the solemn doggerel.
'All you that in the condemn'd hole do lie,' groaned the Bellman of
St. Sepulchre's in his duskiest voice, and they who held revel in
the condemned hole prayed silence of their friends for the familiar
cadences:

All you that in the condemn'd hole do lie,
Prepare you, for to-morrow you shall die,
Watch all and pray, the hour is drawing near,
That you before th' Almighty must appear.
Examine well yourselves, in time repent
That you may not t' eternal flames be sent;
And when St. Pulchre's bell to-morrow tolls,
The Lord above have mercy on your souls.
Past twelve o'clock!

Even if this warning voice struck a momentary terror into their
offending souls, they were up betimes in the morning, eager to pay their
final debt. Their journey from Newgate to Tyburn was a triumph, and
their vanity was unabashed at the droning menaces of the Ordinary. At
one point a chorus of maidens cast wreaths upon their way, or pinned
nosegays in their coats, that they might not face the executioner
unadorned. At the Crown Tavern they quaffed their last glass of ale, and
told the landlord with many a leer and smirk that they would pay him on
their way back. Though gravity was asked, it was not always given; but
in the Eighteenth Century courage was seldom wanting. To the common
citizen a violent death was (and is) the worst of horrors; to the
ancient highwayman it was the odd trick lost in the game of life. And
the highwayman endured the rope, as the practised gambler loses his
estate, without blenching. One there was, who felt his leg tremble in
his own despite: wherefore he stamped it upon the ground so violently,
that in other circumstances he would have roared with pain, and he left
the world without a tremor. In this spirit Cranmer burnt his recreant
right hand, and in either case the glamour of a unique occasion was a
stimulus to courage.

But not even this brilliant treatment of accessories availed to save the
highway from disrepute; indeed, it had become the profitless pursuit
of braggarts and loafers, long before the abolition of the stage-coach
destroyed its opportunity. In the meantime, however, the pickpocket was
master of his trade. His strategy was perfect, his sleight of hand as
delicate as long, lithe fingers and nimble brains could make it. He had
discarded for ever those clumsy instruments whose use had barred the
progress of the Primitives. The breast-pocket behind the tightest
buttoned coat presented no difficulty to his love of research, and he
would penetrate the stoutest frieze or the lightest satin, as easily as
Jack Sheppard made a hole through Newgate. His trick of robbery was
so simple and yet so successful, that ever since it has remained a
tradition. The collision, the victim's murmured apology, the hasty
scuffle, the booty handed to the aide-de-camp, who is out of sight
before the hue and cry can be raised--such was the policy advocated two
hundred years ago; such is the policy pursued to day by the few artists
that remain.

Throughout the eighteenth century the art of cly-faking held its own,
though its reputation paled in the glamour of the highway. It culminated
in George Barrington, whose vivid genius persuaded him to work alone and
to carry off his own booty; it still flourished (in a silver age) when
the incomparable Haggart performed his prodigies of skill; even in our
prosaic time some flashes of the ancient glory have been seen. Now
and again circumstances have driven it into eclipse. When the facile
sentiment of the Early Victorian Era poised the tear of sympathy upon
every trembling eyelid, the most obdurate was forced to provide himself
with a silk handkerchief of equal size and value.

Now, a wipe is the easiest booty in the world, and the Artful Dodger
might grow rich without the exercise of the smallest skill. But wipes
dwindled, with dwindling sensibility; and once more the pickpocket was
forced upon cleverness or extinction.

At the same time the more truculent trade of housebreaking was winning
a lesser triumph of its own. Never, save in the hands of one or two
distinguished practitioners, has this clumsy, brutal pursuit taken on
the refinement of an art. Essentially modern, it has generally been
pursued in the meanest spirit of gain. Deacon Brodie clung to it as to
a diversion, but he was an amateur, without a clear understanding of
his craft's possibilities. The sole monarch of housebreakers was Charles
Peace. At a single stride he surpassed his predecessors; nor has the
greatest of his imitators been worthy to hand on the candle which
he left at the gallows. For the rest, there is small distinction
in breaking windows, wielding crowbars, and battering the brains of
defenceless old gentlemen. And it is to such miserable tricks as this
that he who two centuries since rode abroad in all the glory of the
High-toby-splice descends in these days of avarice and stupidity. The
legislators who decreed that henceforth the rope should be reserved for
the ultimate crime of murder were inspired with a proper sense of humour
and proportion. It would be ignoble to dignify that ugly enterprise of
to-day, the cracking of suburban cribs, with the same punishment which
was meted out to Claude Duval and the immortal Switcher. Better for the
churl the disgrace of Portland than the chance of heroism and respect
given at the Tree!

And where are the heroes whose art was as glorious as their intrepidity?
One and all they have climbed the ascent of Tyburn.

One and all, they have leaped resplendent from the cart. The world,
which was the joyous playground of highwaymen and pickpockets, is now
the Arcadia of swindlers. The man who once went forth to meet his equal
on the road, now plunders the defenceless widow or the foolish clergyman
from the security of an office. He has changed Black Bess for a
brougham, his pistol for a cigar; a sleek chimney-pot sits upon the
head, which once carried a jaunty hat, three-cornered; spats have
replaced the tops of ancient times; and a heavy fur coat advertises at
once the wealth and inaction of the modern brigand. No longer does he
roam the heaths of Hounslow or Bagshot; no longer does he track the
grazier to a country fair. Fearful of an encounter, he chooses for the
fields of his enterprise the byways of the City, and the advertisement
columns of the smugly Christian Press. He steals without risking his
skin or losing his respectability. The suburb, wherein he brings up
a blameless, flat-footed family, regards him as its most renowned
benefactor. He is generally a pillar (or a buttress) of the Church, and
oftentimes a mayor; with his ill-gotten wealth he promotes charities,
and endows schools; his portrait is painted by a second-rate
Academician, and hangs, until disaster overtakes him, in the town-hall
of his adopted borough.

How much worse is he than the High-toby-cracks of old! They were as
brave as lions; he is a very louse for timidity. His conduct is meaner
than the conduct of the most ruffianly burglar that ever worked a
centre-bit. Of art he has not the remotest inkling: though his greed
is bounded by the Bank of England, he understands not the elegancies of
life; he cares not how he plumps his purse, so long as it be full; and
if he were capable of conceiving a grand effect, he would willingly
surrender it for a pocketed half-crown. This side the Channel, in brief,
romance and the picturesque are dead; and in France, the last refuge of
crime, there are already signs of decay. The Abbe Bruneau caught a whiff
of style and invention from the past. That other Abbe--Rosslot was his
name--shone forth a pure creator: he owed his prowess to the example of
none. But in Paris crime is too often passionel, and a crime passionel
is a crime with a purpose, which, like the novel with a purpose, is
conceived by a dullard, and carried out for the gratification of the
middle-class.

To whitewash the scoundrel is to put upon him the heaviest dishonour: a
dishonour comparable only to the monstrously illogical treatment of
the condemned. When once a hero has forfeited his right to comfort and
freedom, when he is deemed no longer fit to live upon earth, the Prison
Chaplain, encouraging him to a final act of hypocrisy, gives him a free
pass (so to say) into another and more exclusive world. So, too, the
moralist would test the thief by his own narrow standard, forgetting
that all professions are not restrained by the same code. The road has
its ordinances as well as the lecture-room; and if the thief is commonly
a bad moralist, it is certain that no moralist was ever a great thief.
Why then detract from a man's legitimate glory? Is it not wiser to
respect 'that deep intuition of oneness,' which Coleridge says is 'at
the bottom of our faults as well as our virtues?' To recognise that
a fault in an honest man is a virtue in a scoundrel? After all, he
is eminent who, in obedience to his talent, does prodigies of valour
unrivalled by his fellows. And none has so many opportunities of various
eminence as the scoundrel.